Love
Plato does not treat of it as simply a state observed in Souls; he also makes it a Spirit-being so that we read of the birth of Eros, under definite circumstances and by a certain parentage. Enneads: III V. 1
The existence of such a being is no demand of the ordinary man, merely; it is supported by Theologians and, over and over again, by Plato to whom Eros is child of Aphrodite, minister of beautiful children, inciter of human souls towards the supernal beauty or quickener of an (…)
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MacKenna / Stephen MacKenna
Matérias
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MacKenna-Plotinus: Eros
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads III,3
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 48 Third Ennead. Third tractate. On providence (2).
1. What is our answer?
All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts - strictly "included" for this Universal Idea does not engender them but encompasses them.
The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul; its parts [i.e., events good and evil] are expressions of these Soulparts.
This unity, Soul, has different parts; the (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: perfection
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroWe come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of this human quality, virtue, or merely the forerunner upon which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less perfection than the accomplished pureness which is almost the Term? To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien: but Goodness is something more. Enneads I,2,
And is it possible to be a Sage, Master in (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads III,4
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 15 Third Ennead. Fourth tractate. Our tutelary spirit.
1. Some Existents [Absolute Unity and Intellectual-Principle] remain at rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into being; but, in our view, the Soul generates by its motion, to which is due the sensitive faculty - that in any of its expression-forms - Nature and all forms of life down to the vegetable order. Even as it is present in human beings the Soul carries its Expression-form [Hypostasis] with it, but is (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: organism
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroWe may treat of the Soul as in the body – whether it be set above it or actually within it – since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. Enneads I,1,
But supposing things external to the Soul are to be counted Evil – sickness, poverty and so forth – how can they be referred to the principle we have described? Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body, which as a material organism rebels against order and measure; ugliness is but (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads III,5
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 50 Third Ennead. Fifth tractate. On love.
1. What is Love? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind? Or is it, perhaps, sometimes to be thought of as a God or Spirit and sometimes merely as an experience? And what is it essentially in each of these respects?
These important questions make it desirable to review prevailing opinions on the matter, the philosophical treatment it has received and, especially, the theories of the great Plato who has many passages dealing with Love, (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Difference
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroIf the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by itself [since it is certainly not an absolute] but by this Difference, just as all identical objects are so by virtue of Identicalness [the Absolute principle of Identity]. Enneads II,4,
Are not Being and Reality (to on and he ousia) distinct; must we not envisage Being as the substance stripped of all else, while Reality is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the others – (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads III,6
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 26 Third Ennead. Sixth tractate. The impassivity of the unembodied.
1. In our theory, feelings are not states; they are action upon experience, action accompanied by judgement: the states, we hold, are seated elsewhere; they may be referred to the vitalized body; the judgement resides in the Soul, and is distinct from the state - for, if it is not distinct, another judgement is demanded, one that is distinct, and, so, we may be sent back for ever.
Still, this leaves it undecided (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: celestial
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe Will of God is able to cope with the ceaseless flux and escape of body stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing the known forms in new substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item but to the unity of idea: now, seeing that objects of this realm possess no more than duration of form, why should celestial objects, and the celestial system itself, be distinguished by duration of the particular entity? Let us suppose this persistence to be the result of the all-inclusiveness of (…)
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MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads III,7
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 45 Third Ennead. Seventh tractate. Time and eternity.
1. Eternity and Time; two entirely separate things, we explain "the one having its being in the everlasting Kind, the other in the realm of Process, in our own Universe"; and, by continually using the words and assigning every phenomenon to the one or the other category, we come to think that, both by instinct and by the more detailed attack of thought, we hold an adequate experience of them in our minds without more ado. (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Esfera
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTherefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, (…)
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MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads III,8
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 30 Third Ennead. Eighth tractate. Nature contemplation and the one.
1. Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end - and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces these - and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Zeus
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroWhat human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no longer to anything below? If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter – kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork – how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such event (…)
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MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads III,9
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 13 Third Ennead. Ninth tractate. Detached considerations.
1. "The Intellectual-Principle" [= the Divine Mind] - we read [in the Timaeus] - "looks upon the Ideas indwelling in that Being which is the Essentially Living [= according to Plotinus, the Intellectual Realm], "and then" - the text proceeds - "the Creator judged that all the content of that essentially living Being must find place in this lower universe also."
Are we meant to gather that the Ideas came into being before (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Term
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroHis Way is indicated in many sumptuous passages of the Enneads - it is coldly charted for him in the tractate on Dialectic, Enneads I,3,. The Term is more richly described in the famous sixth tract of the same First Ennead: the main need, the cry, of man’s nature is to become actually, as he is always potentially, Divine: all his faculties, images each of its next highest, culminate in the Intellectual-Principle or Intellective-Principle, the Intuitional or True-knowing Faculty; and his (…)
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MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads IV,1
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 21 The Fourth Ennead First tractate. On the essence of the soul (1).
1. In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] as the noblest of its content, but containing also souls, since every soul in this lower sphere has come thence: that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world belong those that have entered body and undergone bodily division.
There the Intellectual-Principle is a concentrated all - nothing of it (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads I,1
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 53 The First Ennead First tractate.
The animate and the man.
1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending.
And what applies to the affections applies also (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads IV,2
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 4 Fourth Ennead. Second tractate. On the essence of the soul (2).
1. In our attempt to elucidate the Essence of the soul, we show it to be neither a material fabric nor, among immaterial things, a harmony. The theory that it is some final development, some entelechy, we pass by, holding this to be neither true as presented nor practically definitive.
No doubt we make a very positive statement about it when we declare it to belong to the Intellectual Kind, to be of the divine (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: substratum
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroBut if Matter is devoid of quality how can it be evil? It is described as being devoid of quality in the sense only that it does not essentially possess any of the qualities which it admits and which enter into it as into a substratum. No one says that it has no nature; and if it has any nature at all, why may not that nature be evil though not in the sense of quality? Quality qualifies something not itself: it is therefore an accidental; it resides in some other object. Matter does not (…)
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MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads IV,3
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 27 Fourth Ennead. Third tractate. Problems of the soul (1).
1. The soul: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt - with, at least, the gain of recognizing the problem that confronts us - this is matter well worth attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time required by minute discussion and investigation? Apart from much else, it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of what sphere the (…)